❗Note: If your use case is of log search (app and security logs) instead of app search (implement search feature in your application or website) then you should check openobserve/openobserve project built in rust that is specifically built for log search use case.

ZincSearch

ZincSearch is a search engine that does full text indexing. It is a lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch and runs using a fraction of the resources. It uses bluge as the underlying indexing library.

It is very simple and easy to operate as opposed to Elasticsearch which requires a couple dozen knobs to understand and tune which you can get up and running in 2 minutes

It is a drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch if you are just ingesting data using APIs and searching using kibana (Kibana is not supported with ZincSearch. ZincSearch provides its own UI).

Check the below video for a quick demo of ZincSearch.

Why ZincSearch

While Elasticsearch is a very good product, it is complex and requires lots of resources and is more than a decade old. I built ZincSearch so it becomes easier for folks to use full text search indexing without doing a lot of work.

Features:

1. Provides full text indexing capability
2. Single binary for installation and running. Binaries available under releases for multiple platforms.
3. Web UI for querying data written in Vue
4. Compatibility with Elasticsearch APIs for ingestion of data (single record and bulk API)
5. Out of the box authentication
6. Schema less - No need to define schema upfront and different documents in the same index can have different fields.
7. Index storage in disk
8. aggregation support

Documentation

Documentation is available at https://zincsearch-docs.zinc.dev/

Screenshots

Search screen

User management screen

Getting started

Quickstart

Check Quickstart

Releases

ZincSearch has hundreds of production installations.

ZincSearch Vs OpenObserve

Feature	ZincSearch	OpenObserve
Ideal use case	App search	Logs, metrics, traces (Immutable Data)
Storage	Disk	Disk, Object (S3), GCS, MinIO, swift and more.
Preferred Use case	App search	Observability (Logs, metrics, traces)
Max data supported	100s of GBs	Petabyte scale
High availability	Not available	Yes
Open source	Yes	Yes, OpenObserve
ES API compatibility	Yes	Yes
GUI	Basic	Very Advanced, including dashboards
Cost	Open source	Open source
Get started	Open source docs	Open source docs or Cloud

Community

• How to develop and contribute to ZincSearch

  Check the contributing guide . Also check the roadmap items

Examples

You can use ZincSearch to index and search any data. Here are some examples that folks have created to index and search enron email dataset using zincsearch:

1. https://github.com/jorgeloaiza48/Enron-Email-DataSet
2. https://github.com/jhojanperlaza/email_search_engine
3. https://github.com/carlosarraes/zinmail
4. https://github.com/devjopa/golab-search
5. https://github.com/avaco2312/zincsearch
6. https://github.com/paolorossig/email-indexer
7. https://github.com/ulimonte05/zincsearching